"I am so glad, dear, but there hasn't been anything to hurt you, has there? I hope Mr. Blackburn hasn't been disagreeable."
"Oh, no, he has been very kind. I cannot begin to tell you how kind he has been." Her voice trembled for an instant, and then went on brightly, "And so has Mrs. Timberlake. At first I didn't like her. I thought she was what Docia calls 'ficy,' but afterwards, as I wrote you so often, she turned out to be very nice and human. First impressions aren't always reliable. If they were life would be easier, and there wouldn't be so many disappointments—but do you know the most valuable lesson I've learned this winter? Well, it is not to trust my first impression—of a cat. The next time old Jonas brings me a lot of kittens and asks me what I think of them, I'm going to answer, 'I can't tell, Jonas, until I discover their hidden qualities.' It's the hidden qualities that make or mar life, and yet we accept or reject people because of something on the surface—something that doesn't really matter at all."
She was gay enough; her voice was steady; her laugh sounded natural; the upward sweep of the black brows was as charming as ever; and the old sunny glance was searching the distance. There was nothing that Mrs. Meade could point to and say "this is different"; yet the change was there, and the mother felt, with the infallible instinct of love, that the daughter who had come home to her was not the Caroline who had left The Cedars six months ago. "She is keeping something from me," thought Mrs. Meade. "For the first time in her life she is keeping something from me."
"Now I must take off my hat and go to work," said Caroline, eagerly, and she added under her breath, "It will rest me to work."
The fragrance of spring was in the air, and through the fortnight that she stayed at The Cedars, it seemed to her that this inescapable sweetness became a reminder and a torture—a reminder of the beauty and the evanescence of youth, a torture to all the sensitive nerves of her imagination, which conjured up delusive visions of happiness. In the beginning she had thought that work would be her salvation, as it had been when she was younger, that every day, every week, would soften the pain, until at last it would melt into the shadows of memory, and cease to trouble her life. But as the days went by, she realized that this emotion differed from that earlier one as maturity differs from adolescence—not in weakness, but in the sharper pang of its regret. Hour by hour, the image of Blackburn grew clearer, not dimmer, in her mind; day by day, the moments that she had spent with him appeared to draw closer instead of retreating farther away. Because he had never been to The Cedars she had believed that she could escape the sharper recollections while she was here; yet she found now that every object at which she looked—the house, the road, the fields, the garden, even the lilacs blooming beneath her window—she found now that all these dear familiar things were attended by a thronging multitude of associations. The place that he had never known was saturated with his presence. "If I could only forget him," she thought. "Caring wouldn't matter so much, if I could only stop thinking." But, through some perversity of will, the very effort that she made to forget him served merely to strengthen the power of remembrance—as if the energy of mind were condensed into some clear and sparkling medium which preserved and intensified the thought of him. After hours of work, in which she had buried the memories of Briarlay, they would awake more ardently as soon as she raised her head and released her hands from her task. The resolution which had carried her through her first tragedy failed her utterly now, for this was a situation, she found, where resolution appeared not to count.
And the bitterest part was that when she looked back now on those last months at Briarlay, she saw them, not as they were in reality, filled with minor cares and innumerable prosaic anxieties, but irradiated by the rosy light her imagination had enkindled about them. She had not known then that she was happy; but it seemed to her now that, if she could only recover the past, if she could only walk up the drive again and enter the house and see Blackburn and Letty, it would mean perfect and unalterable happiness. At night she would dream sometimes of the outside of the house and the drive and the elms, which she saw always shedding their bronze leaves in the autumn; but she never got nearer than the white columns, and the front door remained closed when she rang the bell, and even beat vainly on the knocker. These dreams invariably left her exhausted and in a panic of terror, as if she had seen the door of happiness close in her face. The day afterwards her regret would become almost unendurable, and her longing, which drowned every other interest or emotion, would overwhelm her, like a great flood which had swept away the natural boundaries of existence, and submerged alike the valleys and the peaks of her consciousness. Everything was deluged by it; everything surrendered to the torrent—even the past. Because she had once been hurt so deeply, she had believed that she could never be hurt in the same way again; but she discovered presently that what she had suffered yesterday had only taught her how to suffer more intensely to-day. Nothing had helped her—not blighted love, not disillusionment, not philosophy. All these had been swept like straws on the torrent from which she could not escape.
The days were long, but the nights were far longer, for, with the first fall of the darkness, her imagination was set free. While she was working with Margaret in the garden, or the kitchen, she could keep her mind on the object before her—she could plant or weed until her body ached from fatigue, and the soft air and the smell of earth and of lilacs, became intermingled. But it was worse in the slow, slow evenings, when the three of them sat and talked, with an interminable airy chatter, before the wood-fire, or round the lamp, which still smoked. Then she would run on gaily, talking always against time, longing for the hour that would release her from the presence of the beings she loved best, while some memory of Blackburn glimmered in the fire, or in the old portraits, or through the windows, which looked, uncurtained, out on the stars. There were moments even when some quiver of expression on her mother's face or on Margaret's, some gleam of laughter or trick of gesture, would remind her of him. Then she would ask herself if it were possible that she had loved him before she had ever seen him, and afterwards at Briarlay, when she had believed herself to be so indifferent? And sitting close to her mother and sister, divided from them by an idea which was more impregnable than any physical barrier, she began to feel gradually that her soul was still left there in the house which her mind inhabited so persistently—that her real life, her vital and perpetual being, still went on there in the past, and that here, in the present, beside these dear ones, who loved her so tenderly, there was only a continuous moving shadow of herself. "But how do I know that these aren't the shadows of mother and of Margaret?" she would demand, startled out of her reverie.
At the end of a fortnight a letter came from Mrs. Timberlake, and she read it on the kitchen porch, where Perzelia, the field hand, was singing in a high falsetto, as she bent over the wash-tub.
"We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in—His—c-r-ow-n!" sang Perzelia shrilly, and changing suddenly from hymn to sermon, "Yas, Lawd, I tells de worl'. I tells de worl' dat ef'n dat nigger 'oman don' stop 'er lies on me, I'se gwine ter cut 'er heart out. I'se gwine ter kill 'er jes' de same ez I 'ould a rat. Yas, Lawd, I tells 'er dat. 'We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n.'"
Mrs. Timberlake wrote in her fine Italian hand: